


champagne problems

by fairmanor



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Breakups, Canon Devation, Champagne Problems, Evermore - Freeform, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Lesbian Rachel, engagements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:34:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28097751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: A canon-deviant reimagining of Patrick and Rachel's final breakup, as inspired by Taylor Swift's "champagne problems".
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/Rachel
Comments: 13
Kudos: 31





	champagne problems

**Author's Note:**

> I highly recommend you listen to champagne problems while you read this! Some of the lines are inspired by it and plus it's just such a beautiful song.
> 
> I'm sorry this is so SAD but I have a lot of feelings about evermore. Like, a ridiculous amount. Anyway, I hope you like this.

Most of their fights end like this.

Patrick sitting upright at the head of the bed, Rachel chest to back between his legs.

He’ll play with her hair for something to do. She’d mentioned she likes that, once upon a time. He’d held onto the information for fifteen years so that he’d always have something to do.

It distracts Rachel, too, to have Patrick’s gentle hand combing her hair into little sections. He never quite got the hang of doing braids, but he makes the pattern of it. Knows the rhythm.

“Is this new shampoo?”

“Mm. They sell it in little solid bars now. Coconut.”

“Smells nice.”

Most of their fights end like this, which is why Patrick and Rachel are confused.

They didn’t have a fight tonight. Not like every other night. Like when Rachel pushes and pushes Patrick to sort out the wedding plans that she can’t bring herself to do. Or when Patrick tells Rachel off for snapping at his mom when she calls to ask how the dress hunt is going.

“Do you want me to ask you?” Patrick whispers into her soft red hair.

Rachel’s throat tightens with an ache that feels gentle, yet at the same time the most painful thing in the world. She nods once, letting her eyes sting hot with tears that she’s begging to fall.

“I don’t think I can say it out loud just yet.”

“Rachel?”

A sniff.

“Yes.”

“Are you a lesbian?”

“Yes.”

And before she can float off with the dizziness of that weight being lifted from her, Patrick’s warm, strong arm is there, his right hand coming round to grip her left shoulder. She can feel the hitch in Patrick’s breath, the uncertainty to his grip that means he knows this isn’t over. Rachel is sure if she cries now, she won’t stop, so she has to get this out soon.

“I think it’s my turn now,” she says. Her voice is tight and wet and far away, a single berry crushed deep in a thicket, the sweet and bitter of it beginning to leak. “Patrick?”

He doesn’t say anything, but she feels him nod.

“Are you gay?”

“Yes.”

If Rachel were someone else, she might want to laugh. To see the absurdity in it, to feel the relief of finally getting here. But she’s not someone else. So she cries.

And Patrick cries with her, mourning the future that neither of them wanted to build. They cry for the relief of having saved each other’s lives at the last possible second. They cry because they know each other other so well, which means they know neither of them are ready to tell their families, and they cry because they have no idea what to tell them instead.

“We were going to have a second engagement party with the cousins that couldn’t come,” Rachel says, wiping her cheek with the heel of her hand. “It’s near to Christmas, my sister bought champagne, I –”

She’s cut off by herself, less able to control her crying than she thinks she’s ever been. The warmth and goodness she feels for speaking her truth is bowling her over just as much as their final breakup, and with every new wave of tears she’s not sure which one she’s crying about.

“Shh, it’s okay,” Patrick placates. Rachel can feel his chest shake with the effort of getting those words out.

“It’s okay,” she repeats, because it is. They’ve broken through the ice, and she _knows_ it’s all up from here, but they need a moment. They haven’t quite reached the surface yet. “I just – I don’t feel ready to tell them, but…for a while, they’re going to hate me. I’d say no offence, but it’s true.”

“And _your_ family’s going to hate _me,”_ Patrick says, taking his hand away from Rachel’s shoulder to wipe his face.

 _She would’ve made such a lovely bride,_ Rachel can hear the troupe of aunts and grandmothers and sisters and sisters-in-law saying. She’d enjoyed their affection, once upon a time. She’d enjoyed her engagement party, if only because she always enjoys having her family in the same place at the same time. But she knows if she keeps going with this, their love and affection will come from a different truth than what’s receiving it, and she can’t. She can’t.

The ring’s still on her finger, cool and heavy. It had been Marcy’s. When Patrick gave it to her, she joked that he was just giving her the free one so he didn’t have to sink a load of money into an engagement ring. The joke hadn’t really landed.

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you didn’t get a new one,” Rachel says aloud without meaning to. Patrick manages a wet laugh.

“So am I,” he says. He reaches forward and runs his thumb over the little rock embedded in the middle. Together, they work it off her finger and close it into Patrick’s hand. The tandem with which they work has always been the same, ever since they were thirteen and their school got computers for the first time and they’d stay in the IT room after hours and teach themselves how to code. This joint brain of theirs, and they’ve just taken the wheels off.

They sit there in silence for an hour. They’ve developed a third sense for each other over the years, so that in the slightest shift or a different breath they can have a hundred conversations.

And as though they’d been talking all the time, as though they’d verbally established who was going where and what was going to happen, Rachel asks Patrick, “so where are you going to go?”

Back when they were in their early twenties and had just moved in together, they used to have so many fights that ended in one-night separation that they kept backpacks full of clothes at the end of their bed. Baggage, slumped into two neat piles. The back of Rachel’s mind is quietly wondering how they didn’t figure it out sooner. Not that that means anything. They’re here now, and all they can do is step forward.

But it still hurts. By _God,_ it still hurts.

“I might book the night train,” Patrick says, his voice hoarse. “I don’t think I can go home to my parents.”

“Mm.”

Rachel doesn’t remember standing up, nor the glass of water or where it came from. She doesn’t remember watching one last episode of their favourite show together, nor ordering a pizza or taking the pictures out of their wallets. Or managing to laugh, really laugh, as they reminisce and trade winter flannels. But the slowly closing cavern in her heart tells her it happened, so that when Patrick is stood at the door, suitcase in hand, all she feels is warmth.

“I love you,” she says. It’s muffled into his shoulder, and she doesn’t quite know if he heard it, but it doesn’t matter. She’s said it so many times that he knows the shape of it blind, the gentle buzz of the syllables against his thick lumberjack coat. “I love you so, so much.”

She never thought that phrase would have room for the way she felt about Patrick. But it’s still there, seated deep inside her, so large she didn’t notice it. She was looking too hard for little kernels of romantic love, impossible love, that she forgot she’d been living with her best friend her entire life. She forgot who had rang in every New Year with her since they were fourteen, who had done her groceries in college the weeks where money was tight. Her _best friend._

They turn together and look at their living room. The electric fireplace that Patrick had always wanted to replace with exposed brick and a real fire. The little Christmas tree they’d put up last week and laughed about the bottom branches falling off. Their little madhouse, they called it.

“You’ll keep in touch?” he says on a breath, as though he’s trying to keep from crying again.

She steadies him with a firm hand closed around his. “I promise,” she insists.

They still have lots to talk about. They still have joint accounts to close and little fights to get out their system and – _God, and people to tell,_ but it can wait. It can wait until the winter air clears their heads, bandages the long-suffering bones they just reset.

She walks him to the train station, bundled up in her fingerless gloves and the thick scarf that Patrick bought her last year. They hug again for so long that Patrick almost misses his train.

Rachel watches it go away until she’s sure it’s halfway across the county. She wants to go home, but there’s something about the cold that’s doing exactly what she expected it to so she sits down on the bench in the station and watches the workers across the street deck the railings in Christmas lights. It’s a quiet night, thankfully.

Her phone lights up and buzzes with a text just as her legs are starting to go numb with the cold.

 **Patrick:** _Hey, Rachel?_

 **Rachel:** _Yeah?_

 **Patrick:** _I’m gay._

The cold leaves Rachel’s body as she heats up with fierce pride.

 **Rachel:** _Hey, Patrick?_

 **Patrick:** _Yeah?_

 **Rachel:** _I’m a lesbian._

She smiles down at her phone, the weight lifted yet again. This time, she doesn’t feel like she’s going to float off with the shock of it.

The signal light comes on, meaning there’s another train on the way. For a mad second, Rachel considers getting on it, sitting in her hurt to the end of the line. But then she remembers she left a candle lit on the mantlepiece. She should probably go and blow it out, maybe replace it with another and watch it burn softly for a while. That way, she won’t be alone.

And as she gets home, settling herself down for a warm, silent night, she hopes that wherever Patrick is, he’s on his way home too.


End file.
